by Iain Banks
Dessous got me to help him with a recalcitrant binding while everybody else swept off down the heft of icing-sugar white in a blur of multi-coloured shapes.
When we were alone, I said, 'There's nothing wrong with this binding, is there?'
'Nope,' Dessous said. He looked around. Our companions had disappeared into the broad valley beneath. The only moving things we could see were the fast-receding black dots of the helicopters, already too far away to hear. 'You want to sit down?'. We sat down in the snow, our skis planted, curved tips like plastic talons scratching at the blue. Dessous pulled out a leather cigar case. 'Smoke?'
I shook my head. 'Only after a drink. But don't let me stop you.'
'Well, I got a hip flask, too, but that's normally only for medical emergencies.'
'I quite agree.'
He prepared and lit a long cigar with some care, then said, 'How you think you're doing, Telman?'
'I don't know. What's the context?'
'Well, impressing me, I guess.'
'Then I've really no idea. Why don't you tell me?'
'Because I want to know how you think you're doing, dammit.'
'All right. I think you think I'm an opinionated socialist feminist, who's half American, half European, combines what you would regard as the worst aspects of both mentalities, has lucked out with some off-the-wall predictions and doesn't really respect the traditions of the Business the way I ought.'
Dessous laughed, and coughed. 'Too hard on yourself, Telman.'
'Good. I was hoping so.' This made him chuckle a little too. 'So, what is all this about, Jeb?'
'Not me who's going to tell you. Sorry.'
'Then who?'
'Maybe nobody, Telman. Maybe Tommy Cholongai. Know him?'
Another Level One: a Chinese-Malay shipping-line owner. I said, 'We've met.'
'Tommy and I have an agreement. Given there ain't much we ever agree on, this is something of an event in itself. Involves you, Telman. If we both agree, then…'
'What?'
He blew out a cloud of blue-grey smoke. 'Then we might ask you to do something.'
'Which would be…?'
'Can't tell you yet.'
'Why not?'
'Can't tell you that, either.'
I sat and looked at him. He was staring up at the tall summit of the highest mountain. Cloud Peak, he'd said it was called, on the way up. Thirteen thousand feet; tallest of the Big Horn range. Custer's last stand had taken place a hundred klicks due north, in Montana. 'You know,' I said, 'all the secrecy surrounding this thing you can't tell me about might put me off whatever it is in the first place, if I ever do get to find out what the hell it is.'
'Yup. Know that. All the same.' He looked at me and grinned. I hadn't really inspected his teeth before: they were uneven, yellow-white, and so probably his own. ' Actually, Telman, I'd tell you now and get it over with but Tommy wouldn't appreciate that, and an agreement is an agreement.'
'So now I have to go see Mr Cholongai, would that be right?'
''Fraid so.'
I crossed my arms and looked around for a while. I was waiting for the cold to seep through my glossy red ski-suit and make my backside numb. 'Jeb,' I said, 'I'm junior to both you guys, but I am on sabbatical and, anyway, I thought I'd worked my way up in the company sufficiently not to get…passed around like this.'
'Better passed around than passed over.' Dessous chuckled.
' "Better looked over than overlooked," ' I quoted. 'Mae West, I believe,' I added, when he cocked an eye at me.
'Fine-looking woman.'
'Just so.'
We skied down to meet the others, were taken back up to more virgin powder and repeated the process, if not the conversation. Soon it was time for lunch, which we took in a Vietnamese restaurant in Sheridan. Dessous regaled us with his plans to develop the drive-in movie theatre/shooting gallery, which meant having a whole sequence of stacked screens ready to be dropped into place, or even a sort of roller system, like a giant scroll; once you'd shot the blue blazes out of one bit, you'd just haul it up or drop it down until you had a fresh area.
The conversation became even more ridiculous when Dessous talked about another project. He'd been taken with the sort of wheeze megalomaniac dictators were so fond of, involving a stadium full of compliant, well-drilled subjects and lots of big, coloured boards. The idea was to use the big, coloured boards to display what looked like a picture of something when seen from far enough away (the other side of the stadium, usually). I'd seen TV pictures of this sort of thing. As far as I could see the standard image was a portrait of whatever power-mad shit-for-brains was in control at the time.
Dessous thought this would be a fun thing to do, but he wanted to take it a step further and have moving images displayed.
The head technical guys who'd come skiing started to get excited, discussing how this could be done. The consensus seemed to be that you'd need a Third World country to get the requisite numbers of people, and that maybe it would be best just to hire an army division or so. Big cubes of expanded polystyrene with six different colours or hues on them just big enough to twirl round without interfering with a neighbour's would give you some degree of flexibility, though it'd be hard to get any control of saturation unless you could light them from inside, which would make them kinda heavy. The control system would be a bitch: you'd have to treat every goddamn person as a single pixel and they'd never be able to memorise more than a few changes. Some sort of individual signalling apparatus would be required. Serious programming of some sort.
I suggested they might call it a Lumpen Crowd Display, or possibly Large Ego Display; LCD or LED. This they thought a hoot, and only encouraged them. What would be their refreshment rate? Could you use all raster-farians? Hey, what if they all wanted a screen dump?
While the technical guys got on with this, Dessous was chairing another discussion group, which was trying to work out what images you could show on this widest of wide screens. Great sporting moments seemed to feature strongly.
I slipped away, stayed longer in the toilets than I really needed to, then stepped into the street outside where no one from the party could see me and checked my phone's signal strength.
'Hi, Kate. How are you?'
'Oh, sorry, Stephen, I…I didn't mean to call you,' I lied. 'Wrong button.'
'That's okay. You all right?'
'Yeah, yeah. You?'
'Fine.'
'Okay, then, sorry.'
'No problem. Where are you, anyway?'
'Place called Sheridan. Wyoming, I think.'
'You skiing with Dessous?'
'Yup. How'd you know?'
'Ah, just masculine intuition. I've been there myself.'
'Where are you now?'
'Ah, still in DC…And it looks like I've got where I'm supposed to be.' I heard the noise of traffic behind his voice as he said, 'Yeah, okay,' to somebody else, then, 'I've got to go,' to me. 'You take care now, okay?'
'Okay.'
'Don't break anything.'
'Yeah, you too,' I said.
Only my heart, I thought.
The following day I took the same Huey back to Omaha (those big olive-green headphones again — for someone who tried to avoid helicopters I seemed to be spending a lot of time on the damn things), then a United 757 to LAX (stodgy muffin, steward with neat butt, brief snooze) and a Braniff 737 to San Francisco (mercifully quiet but overflowingly obese woman in seat alongside — smelled strongly of French fries). A hired car took me home to Woodside.
The place was warmer than Nebraska but the house felt cold.
I watered my long-suffering cactuses and made a few calls. I met with some old friends in Quadrus, a Menlo Park restaurant popular with some of the PARC guys. I ate too much, drank too much and smoked too much, and babbled happily about nothing of consequence at all.
I invited Pete Wells back to my place. He's a research analyst and an old pal/lover, still a good-time guy and up for the occasi
onal friendly fuck, though he is engaged to some lucky lass in Marin and so not for much longer. We made hazy, stoned, well-tempered love to Glen Gould playing J. S. Bach, listening to the man humming and singing along.
I slept well, apart from a weird dream about Mike Daniels searching my garden for his missing teeth.
The next morning, with Pete already gone and me both a little bleary and not particularly well rested, I repacked my bags — with DKNY, mostly — and took the Buick back to meet its buddies at San Francisco International's Alamo, then it was a JAL 747-400 to Tokyo via Hawaii (twenty minutes late leaving due to two tardy suits; I joined in the Mean Group Stare when they finally stumbled into First trying not to look sheepish and studiously avoiding everybody's eyes. Sushi very good. Played both Garbage albums, separated by Madonna's Ray of Light. Slept well). Cathay Pacific Airbus 400 from Tokyo to Karachi (shown how to play with game console in seat by Japanese kid; very good sleep later — worry that I may be turning into woman in a song I heard once who only slept on planes. Bumpy landing).
I had a feeling that whatever passport I chose for Karachi it would be the wrong one, but I decided on the British one and was pleasantly surprised: whisked through. The place was packed, the air was thick with a medley of smells, the humidity was stifling and the lighting in the arrivals hall was terrible. Over the crowds I spotted a board being held up with a rough approximation of my name on it. I hadn't been able to find a trolley so I held my suit carrier out in front of me and used it to work open a path in the right direction.
'Mrs Telman!' said the young Pakistani man holding the sign up. 'I am Mo Meridalawah. Very pleased to meet you!'
'It's Ms Telman, but thank you. How do you do.'
'Very well, thank you. Let me…' He took my bags off me. 'Follow me, please! This way. Out of the way there, coarse fellow!'
No, really, he did.
Hiltonised overnight, and restless, I got up, kicked the previous day's newspapers out of the way, booted the ThinkPad and spent some time on a few techy-oriented news groups before going back to more disturbed sleep. Mo Meridalawah reappeared mid-morning and drove me back to the airport through some of the most chaotic traffic I had ever seen. It had been just as bad the evening before but I had assumed then it was rush-hour.
There was no such excuse now, and it was even more terrifying in daylight; unbelievable numbers of bicycles, trucks belching black diesel fumes, garish buses, motorised trikes and cars driven seemingly at random in any direction as long as it was either directly across our path or on a collision course. Mo Meridalawah waved his hands about and chattered ceaselessly about his family, cricket and the incompetence of his fellow road users. Karachi airport was almost a relief.
Yet another helicopter: one of those ancient, tall Sikorskys with the engine in the bulbous nose and the flight deck up a ladder. The cabin was actually quite comfortably kitted out, but it all looked worryingly old-fashioned and well worn. Mo Meridalawah waved goodbye from the tarmac with a white handkerchief as though he for one never expected to see me again. We chopped out over the city, across dense green mangrove swamps, along the coast and then across the lines of surf and out over the Arabian Sea.
The Lorenzo Uffizi had been a cruise ship for nearly thirty years; before that it had been one of the last transatlantic liners. Now it was out of date, its powerful but old engines were hopelessly inefficient and the vessel as a whole was just too old to refit again economically. It was only worth scrapping, and it was to complete that process that it had come here from the yard in Genoa where its more valuable and salvageable fittings had been removed.
Sonmiani Bay is where a lot of the world's ships end up. The broad beach slopes smoothly into the sea, so that the vessels can be aimed at the sands, put to full speed ahead and then just run aground. On the vast beach there's plenty of room for whole fleets of obsolete ships, and in the countryside around there are hordes of impoverished people willing to work for a pittance, cutting the ships up with torches, attaching chains and hawsers to sections of hull and then — if they're quick enough — getting out the way in time when the giant winches further up the shore haul the pieces of ship off. More cutting, more dragging by winches, then the bits are craned on to rail flatcars and hauled to a quay side thirty miles away, where the scrap is loaded aboard ships bound for anyone of a dozen steel mills throughout the world.
I had heard of Sonmiani Bay, I had read about it in a magazine twenty years earlier and just a couple of years ago I'd seen some TV footage, but I'd never been there. Now I was going to get to see it first hand, and I'd be arriving by ship. Tommy Cholongai was a Level One exec who could fairly be described as a shipping magnate. The first time I'd used this phrase in front of Luce she'd asked, did that make him anything like a fridge magnate. Normally I'd have said something, but as I recall I'd just asked her if she was still looking for Mr Cannon, and so my lips were tied. Today, I'd been told, Mr Cholongai was going to fulfil a lifelong ambition by being at the controls when the Lorenzo Uffizi hit the beach at full speed.
The Lorenzo Uffizi was still an impressive sight. It was about fifty klicks offshore, lying still in the water a few hundred metres from the comparatively toy-like shape of Mr Cholongai's own motor yacht. We circled the liner, level with its two tall funnels. The ship was creamy white, streaked here and there with rust; the funnels were blue and red and the stern funnel was the source of a thin streamer of grey smoke. Windows glittered with reflected sunlight. Empty lifeboat derricks stood like lamp-posts along the boat deck — there was just one lifeboat left on each side, up near the bridge — and its two drained swimming-pools gaped pale blue beneath the dazzling cloudless sky, Ballardesque.
The Sikorsky landed on the broad curve of a stern tier still marked out for deck games. One of Cholongai's assistants, a small Thai called Pran whom I vaguely knew from a company conference a few years earlier, slid the helicopter's door open for me and mouthed a welcome over the scream of the engine.
'I have wanted to do this for years,' Tommy Cholongai said. 'Captain, with your permission?'
'Certainly, Mr Cholongai.'
Cholongai took hold of the brass handle and, with a big grin on his face, moved the bridge telegraph indicator all the way down to the Full Ahead position. The telegraph made the appropriate ringing, chiming noises. He brought it back to All Stop to the sound of more bells, and then set it back to Full Ahead again and left it there. The rest of us — including the Lorenzo Uffizi's captain and first officer and the local pilot as well as Cholongai's personal staff — looked on. A couple of Cholongai's PAs started clapping enthusiastically, but he smiled modestly and waved them to be silent.
Beneath our feet, the ship began to shudder as the engines spun up to speed. Mr Cholongai stepped to the ship's wheel, followed by the rest of us. The wheel was a good metre across, each handle tipped with brass. When the ship had some way on her, moving steadily across the gentle swell and still slowly gathering speed, Cholongai asked the pilot for the heading and then spun the wheel, watching the compass display in its overhead binnacle. The ship's course curved gradually, her bows turning to face the sands of Sonmiani Bay, still out of sight over the horizon. At nearly thirty knots, our arrival ought to coincide with high tide.
Satisfied that we were pointing in the right direction, with approving nods from our captain and pilot, Mr Cholongai relinquished control of the wheel to a small, smiling Chinese seaman, who didn't look remotely big enough to handle it. 'You take good care now,' Mr Cholongai said to the seaman, patting him on the back and grinning broadly. The little Chinese guy nodded enthusiastically. 'I'll be back in an hour, yes?' More nodding and smiling.
He turned, scanning the faces gathered round him until he saw me. 'Ms Telman?' he said, and indicated the way off the bridge.
We sat on the sun deck just beneath the windows of the bridge, shielded from the ship's self-made wind by tall, sloped panes of glass, all streaked by dried salt and spattered here and there by birdshit. Above us a
parasol provided shade, its edges rippling in the breeze. The two of us sat on cheap plastic seats around a white plastic table. A white-coated Malay steward delivered iced coffee.
The air felt thick and hot and the faint breeze curling over the glass barrier didn't seem cooling at all. I'd dressed in a light shot-silk suit, the coolest outfit I had with me, but I could feel sweat trickling down between my shoulder-blades.
'My friend Jeb tells me you are concerned, Ms Telman,' Cholongai said. He sipped his iced coffee. He was a dense-looking man, of average height and bulky but smooth-skinned with spiky grey hair. He'd put on sunglasses when we'd come outside. With so much sunlight and white paintwork around it was very bright even within the parasol's shade, and I was glad I'd remembered my own Ray-Bans.
'I seem to be,' I looked round at the paintwork's glare, 'getting kept in the dark, Mr Cholongai.' I smiled. I tried the iced coffee. Very cold, very strong. I shivered, the sensation of cold and the white blaze of light suddenly taking me back to the snowfields of Wyoming.
He nodded. 'This is true. One cannot tell everybody everything.'
Well, that was suitably gnomic. 'Of course,' I said.
Cholongai was quiet for a moment. He sipped at his coffee. I resisted the urge to fill the silence. 'Your family,' he said eventually. 'Do you still see them very often?'
I blinked behind the shades. 'I suppose I have two families,' I said.
'Truly you are blessed,' Cholongai said, without any obvious irony.
'I'm afraid I don't see either often. I was an only child, my mother was a single parent, she was also an only child, and she died some time ago. I met my father just once. Mrs Telman was like a mother to me…more like an aunt, perhaps. I only met her husband once, on the day of the court hearing when she — they — adopted me.' I was not, of course, telling Cholongai anything he couldn't find out from my personnel file; I didn't doubt that some underling had already briefed him on all this.